


Der Zauberlehrling

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: SGA - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-23
Updated: 2010-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 14:49:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronon wants to learn some science.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Der Zauberlehrling

There were times when Rodney could appreciate the beauty, subtlety and fundamental quirkiness inherent in the thought processes of the Ancients, as reflected in the multi-layered technical marvel known as Atlantis.

This was not one of them.

"Try it now," he growled into his radio, kneading his lower back with his free hand. He should put in a requisition for an on-site chiropractor. Could you requisition people?

_"Initializing,"_ Zelenka said in his ear. _"Anything?"_

The crystals in front of him stayed depressingly dark. "Nothing," Rodney moaned.

_"Perhaps coupling number seventy-seventy is not aligned."_

"If the coupling wasn't aligned, something would have exploded by now," Rodney snapped, and dove into the wall again. "Trying something else here, hold on."

Any sane engineer—any moderately evolved human engineer, that is—would have thought to put the city's essential systems into a hierarchy, main conduits branching off into smaller down to the level of the speaker or faucet or outlet. This hypothetical engineer would probably have bundled these systems, in fact, so that the same point of access could be used to handle anything from catastrophic power failure to a clogged pipe, but not bundled them so tightly that one blown router would compromise entire branches of the system. It was elegant, it was efficient, and it made troubleshooting a breeze.

The Ancients, on the other hand, had favored an intricate distributed network full of multiple redundancies and interlocking pathways. There were no water mains or junction boxes, just couplings and relays where water and power and data could pass from one of many point As to one of many points Bs. The closest thing they had to a bottleneck anywhere was the ZPM room, which was more a matter of technical necessity than any principle centralization—and even that governed a complicated ring-shaped distribution grid. On his most forgiving days, Rodney thought of the system as a multi-layered spiderweb of mind-blowing intricacy; the rest of the time, he found it more akin to driving in Boston.

Oh, there was a logic to it, and even a certain aesthetic; he could even remember a time when it all made perfect sense, during the Ascension fiasco. It was certainly a major contributing factor to the city's durability—ten thousand years of problem-free operations and counting.

The problem was that, when they _did_ have a problem, it was fucking impossible to fix.

_"Rodney?"_ Zelenka asked on the radio.

"McKay?" someone asked at almost the same time, in the vicinity of Rodney's feet.

"Working," Rodney said, and rotated a control crystal. "Okay, Radek, try it again."

_"Initializing."_

The power went out in the whole corridor. "Dammit!"

"McKay," said the voice outside the wall again.

Rodney ignored it. "Okay, what the hell did you do?"

_"I am doing nothing,"_ Zelenka grumbled. _"We are seeing power failure in the entire level."_

"McKay."

"Great. Just peachy. Tell me it's just this level."

_"So far...wait..."_

"Radek..."

"McKay!"

"Working here!"

A stream of Czech invective burst into his ear. _"Rodney, must go, Kusinagi reports flooding on Tower Eight."_

"Flooding!" Rodney tried to sit up and bumped his head sharply against a bank of crystals. "How do we have flooding? I did not authorize any potential flooding!"

_"I will tell you when I find out!"_

"McKay..."

"My quarters are on level eight, Radek!"

_"Good-bye, Rodney."_

His radio clicked off audibly. A moment later, he was dragged out of the wall by his ankles, screaming.

In the murky daylight that now filled the corridor. Rodney recognized Ronon just in time to avoid kicking him in the face. "What the hell are you doing?"

"You were ignoring me," Ronon said, crouching at Rodney's side.

"Because I am _working."_ Rodney held up his handheld and the attached probe. "Do you understand that? Hmm? I am _busy_ trying to restore water and power and communications and other such fun things to our city."

Ronon looked up at the ceiling. "Doesn't look like you're getting real far."

Rodney sighed and shut his eyes. It wasn't his fault that Ancient technology was the equivalent of a Porsche with the hood welded shut. It wasn't even his fault that Atlantis was _broken._ Well, mostly not his fault. Landing the city on her new home (well, okay, crashing it) hadn't been kind to ten thousand year old architecture, no matter how tough or redundant or phenomenally advanced, though Rodney was going to give Sheppard points for getting them down in one piece. Critical systems had failed all over the city, critical systems like _plumbing,_ and it was up to Rodney (and, okay, the rest of the geek population) to fix them all, preferably before half the base started smelling like unwashed gym socks. He didn't even have the help of the Apollo, because they'd used their shield to brake Atlantis' descent, and as a result were even more screwed than the city was. At least they had functional troubleshooting protocols.

Ronon poked Rodney in the ribs. "McKay."

"What? What, what, what? What is it?" Rodney snapped. "What is so damn important that you have to quite literally _drag_ me away from my work? Are we under attack? Has something exploded? Did you perhaps pull a ZPM out of your _hair_ while looking for a knife?"

Ronon sat back on his heels. "I want to learn science."

Rodney wondered if some there had been some sort of gate malfunction, and this was Hell. He sat up, set his tools aside, rubbed his face, and said, "Excuse me?"

Ronon shrugged, causing the bandage over his right shoulder to pull oddly. "I haven't been much help lately. Don't have anything else to do. Thought I could chip in."

Rodney considered this rare display of verbosity for a moment. "And this has nothing to do with, say, crushing boredom in the absence of the ability or opportunity to hit things really hard?"

Ronon seemed to think about this for a minute. "Yeah, that too."

"Well, as long as that's out in the open," Rodney said. "And why exactly are you inflicting this newfound thirst for knowledge on me, as opposed to somebody who isn't _vitally important and up to his ears in critical system failures?"_

"I taught you swords," Ronon said, sounding marginally annoyed.

"No," Rodney said, "I asked you a perfectly reasonable question about the composition of the alloy used in your sword, and somehow this translated into you beating me with a large stick. By analogy, I should tie you up and subject you to painful, random electric shocks for half an hour before our next off-world mission, whenever the hell _that_ will be."

Ronon got a dark look on his face, but rose gracefully to his feet. "Just trying to help," he muttered flatly.

Rodney pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking of blue skies and wide, open fields. They could always use another pair of competent hands... "Fine," he said. "Get over here. I don't suppose you picked up any sort of technical degree in your years of roaming to complement your skills at killing Wraith and foraging for wild berries?"

"I can service my gun," Ronon said. Rodney had no idea what this meant in terms of Ronon's practical skills, as he'd never gotten a good look inside the workings of the gun, no matter how many times his fingers had itched to. Considering the consequences of asking about the sword (and it was really a perfectly good question, because even a titanium alloy would bend _eventually_ given some of the shit Ronon does) Rodney has in fact almost decided that he'd rather not know the sordid details about the gun. It might end in target practice.

Ronon crouched and peered into the wall panel that Rodney had removed, and the mess of crystals, wires, cables and screens inside it. "This looks hard."

"Yes," Rodney said, "this is very hard. That is why we have Mensa members with multiple doctorates playing electrician, plumber and telephone lineman instead of advancing their respective fields of science. It is why I am out here, causing short-circuits, instead of in my lab, writing yet another wickedly insightful and staggeringly ingenious paper, redefining our understanding of the nature of the universe, and generally advancing my campaign for an eventual Nobel Prize, provided the Pegasus Galaxy doesn't kill me first."

"Is that crystal supposed to tilt like that?"

Rodney followed Ronon's pointing finger. The crystal was definitely not supposed to tilt like that. He pushed it back into its slot, and the lights in the corridor came back on.

Rodney glared at Ronon. Ronon, as far was possible, looked innocent.

"For the record," Rodney said, "that was _luck."_

-/--/--/-

Radek charged down the corridor, checking his tablet every few yards as if that was going to help. He had to find Rodney, because a) no one else had any ideas about fixing the desalination pump except exorcism and b) Rodney would find out eventually about the foot of standing water in his quarters and it would be best if they could get that out of the way quickly. But the internal sensors for this level were dead, and since Rodney wasn't responding on radio the communication system was probably out too, and so Radek was having to find Rodney the hard way. At least the lights appeared to be back on.

He came around a corner, where Rodney was last known to be working, and frowned to see _two_ pairs of legs protruding from an embedded console. The sneakers and black BDUs were obviously Rodney, but Radek did not recognize the boots and tan pants, at least not until the lights flickered and something buzzed inside the wall. "No!" Rodney shouted. "No, no, no! Do you see where my finger is pointing? Do you _see_ my finger? That is a _relay_ crystal, and it's only modulating power flow through this _entire sector_ of the city, so tell me, Conon, in what bizarre parallel dimension does it seem like a good idea to _poke_ the highly charged superconductor with a very delicate and expensive probe? Did you just want to see how much voltage it would take to make your hair stand on end like Sheppard's? 'Cause that would not be a good look for you, especially considering you'd be _dead!"_

And Ronon, of all people, growled back, "So how was I supposed to know it's a relay?"

"I told you, you can judge by the shape and the polarization pattern—look, are you even paying attention? Because there's no point in my explaining this again if you're just going to lay there and think about knives."

"I'm listening," Ronon said.

Radek cleared his throat. "Rodney?"

"What, what, what?" He shimmied out of the wall and glowered. "Oh, it's you. Did you fix the flooding?"

"No," Radek says, "and communications are out for everything below Level Six."

"Oh, that's just peachy." Rodney jabbed Ronon in the thigh and started collecting his gear. "Come on, Ronon, we've got to fix the communication repeaters. If you're a good boy, I'll even let you hold a screwdriver."

"Actually, you need to fix the number nine desalination pump," Radek said. "Because the flooding hasn't stopped."

Rodney's face fell. "Are you serious—look, how bad is it? By which I mean how much water is in my quarters? Are we going to have to fumigate? Never mind, of course you don't know or you wouldn't need me, out of the way—"

While Radek quietly counted to one million by primes, Rodney charged off, a dangling probe flapping behind him. Ronon slid out of the wall and stood gracefully, stretching his wounded shoulder a bit. "Where's he going?"

"We are having slight flood on Level Eight," Radek explained. "Are you, uh—that is, I do not wish to intrude—"

"He's teaching me science," Ronon said, as if this were perfectly normal.

Radek blinked. "Rodney is—is teaching?"

"Yeah."

_"Rodney_ is teaching you?"

Ronon shrugged. "I've had worse taskmasters."

"Yes, but—" Radek looked back in the direction that Rodney had fled to. "Rodney agreed to this?"

"Yup."

"You did not hurt him?"

Ronon scowled. "No."

"Huh."

"Is that a problem?"

"What? No, no..." Radek busied himself with his tablet, wondering if Ronon knew that he _loomed._ "Just...it is surprising behavior from Rodney. He believes that undergraduate students were invented by God to punish him for his brilliance and he says so, loudly and often."

Ronon shrugged. "Maybe they were bad students."

Suddenly, Rodney teaching Ronon didn't seem quite so bizarre anymore.


End file.
